“Hannibal Lechter and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Sawyer family don’t really move in the same social circles at all,” writes Daryl Jones. He maintains that same engaging level of wit and insight throughout Sleeping With the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. The Trinity College English professor is expansive in scope and admirably succinct. At 181 pages (including index), his book covers horror from myth and folklore through the literature and film that certain currents of anxiety and fear have inspired.
Jones is remarkable for his refusal to trim reality—unlike that miserable lot of academics tenured in the ‘70s—to fit one theory or another (preferably of French origin). He agrees with H.P. Lovecraft that “fear of the unknown” is at horror’s root—but it’s not the only root. He argues that horror is also a funhouse mirror of contemporary social and political anxiety. Bran Stoker’s Dracula and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the sources for innumerable films and books in the coming century, were both published in 1897 at the zenith of the British Empire and imagined London beset by powerful aliens. Perhaps Rule Britannia might crumble into Ruined Britannia?
Sleeping With the Lights On also examines director John Carpenter’s opposition of right-wing horror (the evil is “out there) and left-wing horror (the evil is “right in here) and finds the assertion right but wanting. The politics of horror are as polymorphous (and perverse) as politics itself.
Jones isn’t the first to recall that Russian author Maxim Gorky saw a profound connection between film and horror—as early as 1896! Gorky described the silent images flickering across a Moscow screen as “the life of ghosts.” The spectral show he watched lent itself well to silent horror films, of which the Germans were the masters. When sound came, Jones writes, “early vampire films still tended to use it sparingly” as if unwilling to break an unspoken spell. The quiet nightmare of Danish director Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) is the masterpiece, but what set the horror agenda in pop culture was Bela Lugosi’s hushed performance in Dracula (1931). His Transylvanian count was intended to be truly horrific but since then, vampires have become the benign aristocrats in the Kingdom of Fear; they are usually wealthy aesthetes who chose their victims sparingly. Think Interview with the Vampire (1994), the Twilight series (2008-2012) and best of all (but unmentioned by Jones), Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
Zombies, on the other hand, are the lumpenproletariat of monsters. Early film portrayals, such as Jacques Tourneur’s strangely beautiful I Walked With a Zombie (1943), expressed sympathy for the undead as enslaved by sinister masters. But as Jones rightly states, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) established the template. Those zombies are slaves whose only master is the rot at the heart of modern society, including the unreflecting desire to consume. They deserve no sympathy and the only thing to be done is kill or be eaten.
In most of its manifestations, horror is “an acknowledgment that there are whole areas of human experience about which realism has little or nothing to say.” Horror as a definable genre began as a push-back to the pious certainties of the Enlightenment and continues to offer a counter-narrative to blithe hopes for the future.
